A Witch's Promise
by LilLolaBlue
Summary: There’s a man with one foot in Heaven, and the other in Hell. There’s a witch’s promise on him and he’ll not break its spell. Love isn’t just for the ones who live in the light. There’s a witch’s promise for the man who laughs in the night.


**A WITCH'S PROMISE**

_lovers tales_

_of sunshine whisper_

_not a shadow in sight_

_but not for you_

_my leather Devil_

_meet me in the night_

_hands clean of blood_

_can hold and beckon_

_in corridors bright_

_but you and i_

_in blood baptized_

_meet me in the night_

_meet me in the night dark heart_

_brute heart of a brute like you_

_love of gun and fist and knife_

_of the boot and the blood and the grue_

_meet me in the night I call_

_your blood will warm to my red Hellfire_

_God made me in Hell for you_

_and you for my desire._

_-Trivelino J. Napier, 1966_

**One: Premonition**

**I: Liv**

My mother was a witch, you know.

For that matter, so was my grandmother.

So was her mother, and so on and so on, all the way back to some little cottage near a green and misty shoal of the Emerald Isle.

And you can cut the cake any way you want to, and say that they were strong women who were practitioners of herbal and folk medicine and possessed greater than normal psi-abilities, but it means the same thing.

Witches.

They were witches, and you know what that makes me, don't you?

Actually, I prefer the term mystic, like William Blake, there are times when I see the angels in the trees.

My mother was a witch, and my father is a devil, and you can slice that pie into a million slivers too, but if you talk to anybody who's still alive who's ever been on the bad side of Dr. John O'Rourke Napier, AKA Crazy Jack, AKA, the Joker, they'll tell you just who they think he think he is.

There are no good devils, but there are good witches, and my mother was one of them, so the good and the bad, they fight it out in me, but that doesn't change the facts.

Now, I was very young when Ma died, and I know her better from the book she left for me than from life, but I know a story she told me, when I was small.

I had asked her if Daddy was a bad man, and she told me the truth.

It upset me.

"Don't let it bother you, Liv. Your father will never be a bad man to you, or to me. And even a bad man deserves a woman to love in his life. I knew that about your father when I was 13 years old. I met him once and knew that he was my fate and I was his. Sometimes, things just are that way Now they say you can't fight fate, Liv. You can duck it and run from it, and deny it all you want, but it comes to you just the same. That's not quite true. People like us, we can bend fate just a little, because we can see it coming. And, when you can see your fatem you can see the fate of other people who are bound up with you. Bad man or good, when I met your father, that's how I knew."

Well, I have an advanced degree in quantum physics, so I don't really believe in fate, and I don't share my mother's orderly view of the world.

I understand that the universe is vast and infinite, and possibly made up of a vast and infinite number of universes that are also vast and infinite, and I know that fate is not the force that drives the universe, entropy is.

Order is an illusion, and an uncomfortable one, at that.

And, because I am a mask, and I work the darkest part of the dark concrete jungle, I know that not only is life not fair, but it is also arbitrary, bizarre and cruel. Anything can happen and it usually does.

And I know that psi ability is genetic, and that my mother learned herbal medicine from her mother, and my grandmother learned it from her mother, and I have the book that they all keep writing it in.

But, even so, my mother was a witch and my father is a devil, and everyone can see I'm made of hellfire, because it rises out of my head in long, firey streams.

So I'm going to talk to you about magic and fate, and about when I was 13 years old, and I realised my mother was at least partly right.

The thing she didn't understand is that fate, like all the rest of the things in this universe, is subject to the forces of entopy.

Even if you can see your fate, and the fates of others, that doesn't mean that what you see is immutable and cannot change.

Seeing your destiny is one thing.

Achieving it is a whole other creature.

Maybe that's the crossroads where magic and science meet.

Science had it's deepest roots in magic, like a love who's roots lie in deepest hell, and mine are the same, I guess.

If you had a key to my private library, you would find the works of Parcelsus, Cagliostro, and Dr. John Dee cheek-by-jowl with Newton, Einstein, Watson & Crick, et. Al.

I know it's a paradox to be a scientist and a magician, but I have always been comfortable with paradoxes, after all, I am one.

I know I never talked like this to you, before, but it occurred to me that from the way I go on about drinking and killing and fucking and working that you might think that nothing goes on in my mind; that I am like a machine.

Nobody is really like a machine.

Definitely not me.

I was always a night owl, even when I was a kid, and when I just started to be 13, I was still a kid, although I grew up fast.

So I was at my friend Laurie's house, staying overnight, and when Laurie stayed up all night, all night lasted till about one for her.

I was still awake at two, so I went down to the kitchen, to sit in the dark, at the kitchen table, eating Oreos and drinking a bottle of Coke.

The back door opened, and Eddie came in, fresh from work, in his costume.

I never saw him in his costume in person, before.

He had a little bit of blood on his face, and a little bit on the white stars on his shoulder shields, and he smelled like leather, gun oil, blood, and sweat.

Before that, I had looked at men, never at boys, and thought that maybe, you know, at some point in my life, when I was older, I might want to give this fucking thing a whirl, but not right away, because what if it hurt, and what was the rush?

At that moment, though, when I got a load of the Comedian in all his grisly glory, I wasn't a little girl anymore.

I looked at him, and I understood magic, and I saw fate. I understood lust, and rage, and I knew why I liked the night.

All of the sudden there was a fire in me and an itch on me that I'm pretty sure will be with me forever, and just like I knew I wanted to be a mask, I knew that, almost as much, I wanted Eddie Blake.

Now you can go ahead and call it love, but love's not enough to explain it.

Love is for people who can take or leave one another; it's for the kind of people who buy Bee Gees records.

I'm talking about lust and magic and fate; and they've been around longer than what people who have no depth to their souls like to call love.

Since that night, I have never been ashamed of what I am, or anything I do, but there is a price to peering into the abyss.

The abyss looks back into you.

The mysteries of lust, magic, and fate are not for the faint of heart.

There are weeks when I can't sleep.

I roam the night like a restless vampire, I know what I want from it, but until I can have it, I'll take every fight and every drink and every screw I can find.

Sometimes, I can't eat.

The kind of love I have for Eddie, if you want to call it that, it's hungry, it's insectile.

Like a fire that burns slowly, but with great heat.

It eats me alive like a swarm of locusts, and leaves me screaming and breathless and broken in my frustration and derangement.

Every year, it gets worse.

I would burn down the stars if it would bring me a millimetre closer to having him; I would loose entropy and chaos upon the universe to turn it all to shapeless mud; I would watch every man and beast and creeping thing burn and drown and suffer and die if I thought it would give me one moment with Eddie.

And if I die in the night, when I'm out there doing my job, fighting for my soul in the streets, using the bad in me to do good, then while I lie bleeding to death in an alley full of piss and puke and beer cans and trash, saved, I'll cast a spell with my last breath, and say his name one more time.

Say it to the white moon, say it to my red blood, say it to the dark night in the darkest part of the concrete jungle.

So, like I said, you don't want to call it love.

Somewhere, in every dark night, there walks a black-hearted black Irishman in shiny black leather.

I see him through my eyes when they are closed, because my mother was a witch and my father is a devil, and I walk the night, full of hellfire.

That big, bad, mean son of a bitch is my fate; I have known that since I was 13 years old.

Sometimes, things just are that way.

If you make them so.

**II: Eddie**

"Let me tell you somethin' right now, Eddie lad. Fire is hot. An' women with red hair, you know what they're made of? Fire. Hellfire. A red-haired broad will make you fuckin' burn, boy. Like a frog in a fryin' pan, you won't know you're cookin' till you're fuckin' dead."

One of his father's more reasonable pronouncements; Eddie had smoked and toasted pretty well at Sal's hands, and he kept coming back for more.

Every girl in New York would break dishes and scream and call you a bastard and a son of a bitch when she was mad at you, but a red-haired girl would throw a knife at the wall by your head and call you a motherfucker and a cocksucker and you had to watch for hot coffee and boiling water, but they were all worth the craziness and the trouble.

Steve always told him he was crazy; Jimmy was a sucker for redheads, himself, he knew they were both crazy, but crazy though he might be, Eddie wasn't stupid.

Far from it.

Danny Boy, on the other hand, for all his college-boy brains, was dumber than a bag of hammers.

If it wasn't for Rorschach, crazy as he was, the Boy Scout would have been dead years ago.

"We can't just go in there and…"

"Fuckin' stop right there, Danny Boy! Why the fuck can't we just go in there? I mean, call me crazy, but ain't that our fuckin' job. Ya know, just goin' in someplace, an' takin' fuckin' care of business?"

"Comedian has a point, Daniel."

Before the Boy Scout could trot out some stale pussified cop talk platitude a la Hollis Mason, a shiny black Buick Wildcat rolled up to the curb, and the window came down.

With it a blast of Howlin' Wolf and cigarette smoke.

"Hey, guys. I'm just headin' home after a night's work. Ya need some help?"

Eddie always wondered if the kid wore yellow and purple on his account.

Probably.

"Yeah. How about slidin' over an' lettin' me drive?"

She gave him a funny look, but, in the end, she moved over, and Eddie got in the driver's seat, which was jacked up so close to the wheel he had to crank it back before he could shut the door.

"You got blocks tied to your feet, kid?"

"Real funny, Mr. Blake. What's the job?"

"See that crumbling old piecea shit building across the street? I'll drive through the windows an' you let loose with the chopper. We need 'em alive an' walkin, so shoot real high and real low. Alright?"

"Sure."

It worked like a charm, and it wasn't long before him and the kid had ten Knot Tops with their hands on top of their heads marching across the street to where Danny Boy had his rocket-age tin can parked.

The part where she shot high and low, that wasn't the thing.

The part where the leader got mouthy and she punched him out, that wasn't the thing.

"Oh, great! Nice methodology, Liv! You know how the cops have been about us being violent. Causing trouble. There's bricks and glass all over the street! And your tire tracks, everywhere! How am I going to explain that away?"

The kid reached into her glove compartment, and drank down the dregs of a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Then, she went into the trunk, and poured some gas from a can into the bottle.

She stuffed a oily piece of rag from the trunk into the mouth of the bottle, lit it on fire with her Zippo, and tossed it through the hole that Eddie had made in the building with her car.

BOOM!

"Goddamn Knot Tops. You know how they blow up their own hideouts when ya get too close to 'em. An' the cops know it, too."

Danny Boy's jaw was working, but there was nothing coming out of his mouth.

She got back in her car.

"Youse guys better get the fuck outa here with those Knot Tops. Cops'll be here soon. I'll be at Trivelino Mac's, if anybody wantsta have a beer with me."

That was the thing, right there.

The Comedian thought about his prospects for the evening.

First, the long ride in the Owl Ship, with Danny Boy's usual pious narration, this time probably about the kid, while he and Rorschach had to keep an eye on ten Knot Tops.

Then, of course, it would be big fun at the police station, while some fat, middle- aged cop would have to process all then of them, when Eddie and the cop and Rorschach and Nite Owl knew damn well that in order to be a Knot Top, you had to kill some poor schmuck at random, just to get into the fucking gang, so all of these slimeballs had, at least once, killed and innocent person in cold blood.

The best he could hope for would be that he could convince Rorcshach to help him stage and escape attempt, and he could give them all two in the head.

Save them and the cops an' the taxpayers a shitload of money.

That would be pretty easy, but then he'd have to listen to more of the Boy Scout's bullshit, and in any case, by the time he got off work, it would be three in the morning, and the only broads you can drop in on at three in the morning for a no questions asked screw were those crazy groupie broads, and one of two things happened when you fucked one of them.

They would either steal your underwear, or cut off a piece of your hair, or something like that, or they would go all gooey on you and for the next three weeks she'd be everywhere you went like a little lost sheep.

Fuck that shit.

The kid's 18, now, she's old enough to drink, legally.

I'll go have a couple beers with her and get ripped, and if I'm still conscious enough to be horny when I get home, I'll jack off and go to bed.

The Comedian opened the passenger door, and got in the Harlequin's car.

Danny Boy gave him a funny look.

That was the next thing he was going to hear.

He'd heard it before.

"Listen, if you think that Liv is such bad news and that she has some weird obsession with you that could just as easily end in her killing you as it would in you guys somehow getting together, why don't you just stay away from her? I mean, I know you knew her mother, and you owe her father, and all that, but, why not just skip it?"

That was the trouble with your rich college-boy WASPS, they didn't fucking understand, anything.

Especially not a witch's promise.

It wasn't something you could explain to somebody like him, anyway, because he was the kind of asshole who would say that Merrie Damiano and her mother, Magdelene Malloy Damiano were "practitioners of traditional folk medicine" and that they had "greater than normal psi abilities" and that "these things run in families, socially and biologically".

Because he could never get his mind around the simple fact that they were witches, and that the kid, she was a witch, too.

Not only that, her father had the devil in him.

That was the kid's problem.

There are no good devils, but there are good witches, and the good and the bad in her were duking it out for whatever it was that made her a witch, that she got from her mother who got it from her mother and so on and so on

Now, Eddie wasn't a religious man, or a philosopher, and so he didn't know what that was, what made a witch a witch, but whatever it was, when one side beat the other and opened Pandora's Box, the kid was going really going to be something, and he was just standing aside so he wouldn't end up one of the bodies she had to stack up to end up on the right side of the mask.

Because that was the other thing you could never explain to Danny Boy.

Danny Boy was a rich WASP born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He had never known hunger, or cold, let alone life in a three room hellhole in East New York with a psychotic, sadistic, baby-raping bastard that was the only father you had.

He had never lived in an America where if you had no money and you needed a doctor, that was tough, and had never been put in a place in life where what a priest told you on Sunday came up somehow lacking.

There probably wasn't a neighbourhood witch where he grew up, but there was one in every fucking Irish and Italian neighbourhood in New York, and East New York was no exception, and in that he and seven of his siblings lived to be adults, Eddie owed a lot of it to Magdalene Malloy Damiano.

Merrie's mother.

Merrie was Aggie's best friend, and a friend to Edie.

Long after Eddie left the neighbourhood, until the day Merrie died, he was still mistrustful of doctors and priest, so Merrie was his doctor and his priest, she put him back together in more ways than one, many times.

And all his life, he had to say, she was his friend, too.

But it wasn't Merrie who explained a witch's promise to him, it was his mother.

My mother had red hair, Danny Boy.

My father used to tell us that there was a curse on all redheads, that Judas had red hair, and that all the Hidden People, elves and fairies and pixies had red hair.

He used to get drunk and say he was a devil, and did the devil's business on the Earth, and that he married a red-haired woman because the devil is a red man, and all redheads are his own.

Aggie was the only living kid who had red hair.

His older brother, Paul, he had red hair.

Looked even redder after Pop threw him down the stairs.

That was no accident.

Maggie Blake, the former Maggie Morgan, had red hair, and violet eyes, and no matter what the old bastard and life and all her drinking did to her, she never managed to get ugly.

Lying in her coffin, she didn't look all that different than she had in the wedding picture, but maybe that was just in his mind, because she was his Ma, and he loved her.

Merrie Damiano, she had black hair, like her father, the Sicilian shoemaker.

Jack had red hair, before he went into the chemical soup, red hair and green eyes.

Like the kid.

She had the red hair and green eyes Jack Napier used to have, and the same wide, red grin, but, it was on Merrie Damiano's lips.

The kid looked so much like her.

No, Merrie Napier.

Especially when she wasn't swearing and cracking wise, she looked like her mother.

Pretty, gentle, spunky, saintly, dead Merrie Napier.

He could go there, they could all go there, to the Damiano apartment, for a little respite from Mick the Merciless' reign of terror, to observe something like regular family life.

Ma had brought Paul there, when he was dying.

Eddie remembered going with her, six years old, crying his eyes out, him and Edie.

Edie named her son Paul.

Paul looked like him, and he looked like Pop.

And it was the neighbourhood witch, Merrie's mother, Magdelene Malloy Damiano who ministered to the wounds and bruises they got from their father's beatings, and the illnesses they suffered because of his neglect.

When Eddie was 15, he was still working construction jobs, and he had an accident where he broke his arm.

It healed wrong, the doctors told him he was going to be a cripple, but Eddie never put much stock in doctors, he went to go see Magdelene, and she re-broke his arm and re-set it for him, and after it healed, right, this time, he had to keep going back to see her every week for a month so she could fool with it, make it right.

One of those times Merrie, who was just 13, then, she came up to the apartment, and she was helping her mother fix his arm.

"Ma, I met the man I'm going to marry, today. Eddie knows him. Jack Napier." She said.

"Jack Napier? Why him?"

"I don't know, Ma. But that's the way it is. It's fate."

He went home that night, and asked his mother what the hell Merrie was talking about, and Maggie explained to him about a witch's promise.

A witch isn't a witch because she can mix medicines and potions, she's a witch because her third eye, her mind's eye, is open a lot wider than other people's is, and she can see a lot more.

A witch can see right into the heart of things, and she can see fate.

Because she can see her fate, she can bend it, and shape it, and get it to do what she wants, and when she's seen something or someone in her fate, then she can bend and shape fate around it, too.

His great-grandmother had called that a witch's promise, and a witch's promise can't be broken.

When he was 15, Eddie ddn't understand half of what his mother had said, but as his life went on he began to understand some of it, but the part he got was that there was such a thing as a wich's promise, and that it couldn't be broken.

He saw the proof of that soon enough.

When he was 18, and she was 16, Merrie Damiano married Jack Napier, and they stayed together until the day she was murdered.

And when she was 11 years old, Eddie pulled her daughter out from under a basement stairwell and saved her from bleeding to death, and two years after that, when the kid was 13, she was eating Oroes and drinking Coke in Sal's kitchen at three in the morning, and he happened to come in to see Sal that night, after work, still in his costume, with blood still on his hands and his face.

The kid might have said "Hiya, Mr. Blake," just like she always did, but Eddie felt all the hair standing up on the back of his neck, and he could feel her put her spell on him, the way Jack must have felt it when Merrie put her spell on him.

It was something like what a young girl could do to a man, but it was more than that, it was a witch's promise, and a witch's promise is something you can't break.

There was no point in not getting in the car, the kid's mother was witch and her father was a devil, and he was as bound to her as he had been to both of them, whether he liked it or not.

One way or the other, Eddie really didn't mind.

Like his father said before he and Edie killed the old bastard, better my own kids than the fucking cops, better the kid than some scumbag I don't know or want to that I never met.

"Sounds good ta me, kid. I'm buyin'."

Her face was weary, but she looked at him and smiled.


End file.
